Triple threat —

Confirmed: Apple’s A6 uses triple-core GPU

It's the same GPU as in the iPhone 4S, there's just more of it.

Details about Apple's new A6 processor have slowly been filtering out since the iPhone 5 was officially announced last week, but now that teardown sites are receiving and dismantling their phones, we're beginning to get a clearer picture of what makes the new SoC tick. We already knew that Apple was using a custom-made 1GHz dual-core ARM CPU to achieve the advertised speed increases, but the graphics processor remained a mystery—now, analysis of the A6 die from AnandTech has confirmed that Apple is using a triple-core GPU with slightly higher clock speeds to double the graphics power of the A5.

The GPU itself is most likely a PowerVR SGX 543MP3, a part that should be familiar to anyone who pays attention to Apple's chips: the dual-core SGX 543MP2 is already in the A5 that powers the iPhone 4S, iPad 2, third-generation Apple TV, and fifth-generation iPod touch; and the quad-core SGX 543MP4 is in the A5X SoC that powers the high-resolution screen of the 2012 iPad. The combination of the extra graphics core, reportedly higher clock speeds, and the increased overall memory bandwidth of the A6 are all enough in total to achieve the doubled performance over the A5 that Apple boasted of at its September 12 press conference.

We'll be taking an in-depth look at the new A6 SoC and its performance in next week's review of the iPhone 5.

It's likely the plastic the chip was encapsulated in, not fully removed.

You basically acid-etch away the plastic until you see what you want. Doing it evenly takes a lot longer than getting it down far enough to see the basic structure, which was the goal for a first look.

That is the ceramic packaging which is what the silicon die is sandwiched in. It used to be ceramic back in the day anyway. They basically split open the package very carefully with very good tools and expose the die.

What does "triple-core" GPU even mean? Presumably it has tens or hundreds of shaders and threads.

It just means that there's three sets of those (see the three identical regions labeled 'GPU CORE'). Calling them 'cores' have always felt a bit weird to me, as GPUs are so different from traditional cores. Hell, AMD's newer processors are often referred to having each core as '1.5 cores' because of how they operate... and GPUs are far more down that path than AMD CPUs.

The regular stuff, no surprise, is SRAM macros --- some form of storage, whether it's a register file, a cache, or some intermediate storage. (Remember that apart from the 2 ARM cores and 3GPU cores shown, this is a SOC so it also has an image processing cell for the camera, an h.264 encode/decode cell, an audio decode cell (so everything else can sleep while audio plays), a memory controller, etc, all with their own local storage needs.

The "green fungus" is the actual functional (irregular) logic. It looks this way because there have been great breakthroughs in automatic layout and routing of transistors, and this is the result. You give the code essentially your network of transistor connections and a bunch of constraints, and it optimizes the heck out of the resulting layout, giving us something that has an organic feel with no visible structure. Layouts from even just a few years ago had much more visible structure because they were either laid-out by hand, or the automatic tools used very rigid rules that imposed artificial structure.

It's not new --- you see the same sort of look on the A4, A5 and A5X dies, but it is more obvious here, I think because these photos are larger and better quality than what we saw when the A4, A5 and A5X first came out.

The regular stuff, no surprise, is SRAM macros --- some form of storage, whether it's a register file, a cache, or some intermediate storage. (Remember that apart from the 2 ARM cores and 3GPU cores shown, this is a SOC so it also has an image processing cell for the camera, an h.264 encode/decode cell, an audio decode cell (so everything else can sleep while audio plays), a memory controller, etc, all with their own local storage needs.

The "green fungus" is the actual functional (irregular) logic. It looks this way because there have been great breakthroughs in automatic layout and routing of transistors, and this is the result. You give the code essentially your network of transistor connections and a bunch of constraints, and it optimizes the heck out of the resulting layout, giving us something that has an organic feel with no visible structure. Layouts from even just a few years ago had much more visible structure because they were either laid-out by hand, or the automatic tools used very rigid rules that imposed artificial structure.

It's not new --- you see the same sort of look on the A4, A5 and A5X dies, but it is more obvious here, I think because these photos are larger and better quality than what we saw when the A4, A5 and A5X first came out.

I'm pretty sure it's just plastic or ceramic or where the processes they used damaged the chip. Most every chip I've seen blown up like that have a very "city streets" looking rectangular pattern to them.

Edit: On a second take and comparing it to previous models I still stand by a lot of it being damage, there's areas that appear obviously burned, but the previous models do have large blocks of the chip that just appears as a weird diffused blob, but well squared off along the edges of their units.

Look at something like this http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/ ... d-systems/which is, I assume, a legit photo from AMD PR, not something created in a day by hackers ripping a device apart. It has essentially the same look. AMD have made a big move into this sort of automated layout.

You may have your assumptions skewed by the fact that (a) older chips did not look like this and(b) Intel still use manual layout for almost everything, so their dies still tend to have that purposeful pattern to them.

The regular stuff, no surprise, is SRAM macros --- some form of storage, whether it's a register file, a cache, or some intermediate storage. (Remember that apart from the 2 ARM cores and 3GPU cores shown, this is a SOC so it also has an image processing cell for the camera, an h.264 encode/decode cell, an audio decode cell (so everything else can sleep while audio plays), a memory controller, etc, all with their own local storage needs.

The "green fungus" is the actual functional (irregular) logic. It looks this way because there have been great breakthroughs in automatic layout and routing of transistors, and this is the result. You give the code essentially your network of transistor connections and a bunch of constraints, and it optimizes the heck out of the resulting layout, giving us something that has an organic feel with no visible structure. Layouts from even just a few years ago had much more visible structure because they were either laid-out by hand, or the automatic tools used very rigid rules that imposed artificial structure.

It's not new --- you see the same sort of look on the A4, A5 and A5X dies, but it is more obvious here, I think because these photos are larger and better quality than what we saw when the A4, A5 and A5X first came out.

Yup, it's fascinatingly ironic, the logic automatically synthesized by computers and machine learning looks almost organic from high up, while the human designed parts like the CPU and GPU cores look more computer-ish.

The regular stuff, no surprise, is SRAM macros --- some form of storage, whether it's a register file, a cache, or some intermediate storage. (Remember that apart from the 2 ARM cores and 3GPU cores shown, this is a SOC so it also has an image processing cell for the camera, an h.264 encode/decode cell, an audio decode cell (so everything else can sleep while audio plays), a memory controller, etc, all with their own local storage needs.

The "green fungus" is the actual functional (irregular) logic. It looks this way because there have been great breakthroughs in automatic layout and routing of transistors, and this is the result. You give the code essentially your network of transistor connections and a bunch of constraints, and it optimizes the heck out of the resulting layout, giving us something that has an organic feel with no visible structure. Layouts from even just a few years ago had much more visible structure because they were either laid-out by hand, or the automatic tools used very rigid rules that imposed artificial structure.

It's not new --- you see the same sort of look on the A4, A5 and A5X dies, but it is more obvious here, I think because these photos are larger and better quality than what we saw when the A4, A5 and A5X first came out.

I'm pretty sure it's just plastic or ceramic or where the processes they used damaged the chip. Most every chip I've seen blown up like that have a very "city streets" looking rectangular pattern to them.

Edit: On a second take and comparing it to previous models I still stand by a lot of it being damage, there's areas that appear obviously burned, but the previous models do have large blocks of the chip that just appears as a weird diffused blob, but well squared off along the edges of their units.

I can't help but feel that we can't actually be looking at just the circuits here, if for no other reason than the fact that the GPU cores are clearly not identical (and why would they not be)?

On the other hand, looking at what name99 posted...if that's for real, holy $#!+; I had no idea. Perhaps the regular circuits clean off more easily than the irregular ones?

I agree with panton41-- I think they only removed enough material to identify the major blocks. Fully exposed areas should look similar to the ARM cores. There are other usually easily identified regular structures (e.g. the multiplier arrays) that are not apparent here.

It's amazing how scalable the PowerVR SGX 540 GPU is. The basic SGX 540 isn't anything to write home about these days but you start placing them in parallel and you get some pretty impressive results. 3dfx would have killed for scaling like this in their day.

The PowerVR SGX 543MP4+ quad-core variant of this GPU is what is inside PlayStation Vita, incidentally.

I've had chips decapped and never had green gunk on it. However, some processes put a goop over the chip. I'm drawing a blank as to what they call the goop since I never worked at a place that used it. There is a lot of black magic in chips. Designers often don't see it all, especially when it comes to packaging. There are all sorts of failure modes in packaging and schemes to counteract them. You often here the rel guys talking about "purple plague."

Ceramic packages generally come apart really easily. They are used in prototyping but generally not final design since ceramic packages are expensive and heavy.

It's amazing how scalable the PowerVR SGX 540 GPU is. The basic SGX 540 isn't anything to write home about these days but you start placing them in parallel and you get some pretty impressive results. 3dfx would have killed for scaling like this in their day.

The PowerVR SGX 543MP4+ quad-core variant of this GPU is what is inside PlayStation Vita, incidentally.

Too bad iPhone 5 won't benefit from having OpenGL ES 3.0 features, even though all new GPU's coming out by the end of the year will.

Why is that? Does the OpenGL version dictate how powerful, pretty, or good the games are?

ES 3.0 is a fairly nice improvement over 2.0, although I wouldn't say it's anywhere near as radical as 2.0 vs 1. One primary benefit of 3.0 is that it makes mobile very similar to desktop OpenGL (specifically 3.3), so porting the OpenGL-specific code between platforms should be a lot easier. It's also backwards compatible with 2.0, so developers won't have to redo lots of code like 1 -> 2, meaning they can also just add bits and pieces of the new features. It should make it a bit easier to make things like a bit prettier while being a bit more performant (obviously it could be balanced different).

At the same time, it'll likely be quite a while after mobile GPUs supporting ES 3.0 are on the market before we actually see games taking too much advantage of it. I think it's a safe bet than the next iPhone will feature Rogue (which supports OpenGL ES 3.0), so iOS should be getting support not too long after Android-land (AFAIK, it's still several months before any OpenGL ES 3.0 GPUs will be ready to ship).

Too bad iPhone 5 won't benefit from having OpenGL ES 3.0 features, even though all new GPU's coming out by the end of the year will.

Why is that? Does the OpenGL version dictate how powerful, pretty, or good the games are?

Well it’s pretty obvious you can’t make any decent games without OpenGL ES 3.0, an Open™ mobile OS and a Superman AMOLEDFX3D 5.2" screen and a hexa-core A20 ARM CPU. Apple is on the decline, as it were, it’s just that NOONE is seeing it!

ES 3.0 is a fairly nice improvement over 2.0, although I wouldn't say it's anywhere near as radical as 2.0 vs 1. One primary benefit of 3.0 is that it makes mobile very similar to desktop OpenGL (specifically 3.3), so porting the OpenGL-specific code between platforms should be a lot easier. It's also backwards compatible with 2.0, so developers won't have to redo lots of code like 1 -> 2, meaning they can also just add bits and pieces of the new features.

After buying into the "porting should be easier" promise just one too many times, I find the bolded part cute, in a "Android apps work on all devices" or "HTML5 makes cross-platform development easier" way. This isn’t a dig at Android or any other platform directly, just that in my experience "easier porting" only ever works in theory. And relatively to all the other aspects of an app or game that need to be retooled for a platform, the OpenGL-specific part don’t really have a big impact (much less so than all the other platform idiosyncrasies do).

But yeah, it will be a bit of an improvement once it arrives. Nothing earth shattering, though.

The regular stuff, no surprise, is SRAM macros --- some form of storage, whether it's a register file, a cache, or some intermediate storage. (Remember that apart from the 2 ARM cores and 3GPU cores shown, this is a SOC so it also has an image processing cell for the camera, an h.264 encode/decode cell, an audio decode cell (so everything else can sleep while audio plays), a memory controller, etc, all with their own local storage needs.

The "green fungus" is the actual functional (irregular) logic. It looks this way because there have been great breakthroughs in automatic layout and routing of transistors, and this is the result. You give the code essentially your network of transistor connections and a bunch of constraints, and it optimizes the heck out of the resulting layout, giving us something that has an organic feel with no visible structure. Layouts from even just a few years ago had much more visible structure because they were either laid-out by hand, or the automatic tools used very rigid rules that imposed artificial structure.

It's not new --- you see the same sort of look on the A4, A5 and A5X dies, but it is more obvious here, I think because these photos are larger and better quality than what we saw when the A4, A5 and A5X first came out.

I'm pretty sure it's just plastic or ceramic or where the processes they used damaged the chip. Most every chip I've seen blown up like that have a very "city streets" looking rectangular pattern to them.

Edit: On a second take and comparing it to previous models I still stand by a lot of it being damage, there's areas that appear obviously burned, but the previous models do have large blocks of the chip that just appears as a weird diffused blob, but well squared off along the edges of their units.

You're both right. Those blobs do indeed look like areas where the density of logic cells is higher. The 'city streets' that you are referring too would be the metal routes between those cells. That level of details just isn't going to be viable at this distance as the metal routes are literally nano-meters across. I'm actually somewhat surprised that the standard cells are visible in these shots. The logic should be entirely covered by the metal routes so whatever they used to etch off whatever material was covering the die must have taken the metal with it too.

ES 3.0 is a fairly nice improvement over 2.0, although I wouldn't say it's anywhere near as radical as 2.0 vs 1. One primary benefit of 3.0 is that it makes mobile very similar to desktop OpenGL (specifically 3.3), so porting the OpenGL-specific code between platforms should be a lot easier. It's also backwards compatible with 2.0, so developers won't have to redo lots of code like 1 -> 2, meaning they can also just add bits and pieces of the new features.

After buying into the "porting should be easier" promise just one too many times, I find the bolded part cute, in a "Android apps work on all devices" or "HTML5 makes cross-platform development easier" way. This isn’t a dig at Android or any other platform directly, just that in my experience "easier porting" only ever works in theory. And relatively to all the other aspects of an app or game that need to be retooled for a platform, the OpenGL-specific part don’t really have a big impact (much less so than all the other platform idiosyncrasies do).

But yeah, it will be a bit of an improvement once it arrives. Nothing earth shattering, though.

I didn't say porting between platforms, I said porting the OpenGL-specific code between platform.

A large part of the goal with OpenGL ES 3.0 was to bring it closer to desktop OpenGL, which lowers the amount of differences between the two sets of specifications. In fact, OpenGL 4.3 is a complete superset of ES 3.0. This isn't likely to be a 'zero lines of OpenGL code need to be changed!' situation going in either direction, but it does bring us closer to a world where the graphics could potentially be shared between the two (desktop and mobile) code bases, which should make porting (which usually isn't a one-off deal, development continues on) a far more pleasing situation. Mind you, I never said it'll make it easy, just easier which is a relative thing. Being kicked once in the face is usually a lot better for your body than being kicked twice in the face... I wouldn't recommend doing either, though.

The A6 iPhone 5 is a killer the iPad 3 isn’t far behind, the 4s, 4 and iPad 2, are still in the game, with the upgrade to iOS 6, designing and engineering your own cpu has payed off big time, imagine a iPad mini with a A6, and the next generations coming with a A7 or A8 cpu’s, the map program is here and will only get better and search will come shortly, however the biggest star is that A6 cpu and future cpu’s to come, combine that with the tech from Anobit. Hmm...